After Zero
by reminiscent-afterthought
Summary: [Occultic;Nine] Yuuta woke up to a world that was familiar to everything but his body, because he'd been watching and listening in all that time.
1. 1

**After Zero**  
1.

He woke up to a strange world… or, rather, that was how the story was supposed to go.

It didn't, quite. Because he'd been listening in on the world since long before. And anyone who read Kiri Kiri Basara knew that… or maybe they only knew someone was keeping his name alive. Maybe they thought: "oh look, Gamon Yuuta has fans that would write in his name, even if he runs the most ridiculous blog."

Not that he really cared. Ridiculous or no, people read his blog which meant he got paid for it. And that meant he'd amassed quite a fortune for when he finally woke up of cold sleep. Though a good amount would go towards paying for it all, probably. Healthcare hadn't exactly become more altruistic over the years. Patients still paid for things they hadn't consented for. And if they couldn't, it was their families who might've been estranged and in the not-know… Though an orphan who'd been in cold sleep for two hundred years didn't exactly have a family to speak of. Just a few bequests from friends who were long gone, and what he'd amassed through Kiri Kiri Barasu.

And it wasn't until he died that he made friends, so the world hadn't really changed that much at all.


	2. 2

**After Zero**  
2.

His things were all gone. Objectively, he knew that, but they echoed in a different sort of hole when he was awake. Most of them weren't precious things, really. Just things that had accumulated around the place. Clothes. Scraps of paper. Trinkets he couldn't even recall. And then there were the important things. Like Skysensor. Like the golden tooth that had been the key to saving them (even if he'd pulled it out of a dead man's mouth). Like the laptop that had been his livelihood… though he'd known it had become a product of his mind a hundred and ninety eight years ago.

Everything felt strange, now that he had a body again. They felt like rock: rough and tearing at his nail-pads until he wished they'd bled, if only to prove it wasn't his body too fragile to cope with this new world.

'You'll get used to it,' they said. That didn't hide their bafflement though, because he knew they'd long since been preparing prioritising for adjustment issues with his mind and now they found it wasn't an issue at all.

His mind had watched the world. His body had been in a container at absolute zero temperature.


	3. 3

**After Zero**  
3.

Some things hadn't changed all that much, and it was rather silly he still had to go through the education system when he'd essentially stalked it for years.

And he was a NEET, too. It just so happened that there were only so many things to listen in on in the world, and high schools were a particular hotspot for occultic chatter. So even if he wasn't a good student by any means, the education system changed slowly enough that even his intermittent eavesdropping sessions affording him ample knowledge to keep up.

Which means he was as bored as he'd always been in class, except this time he was bored and knowledgeable as opposed to born and ignorant.

At least there were other NEETs in the twenty-third century too. And occult fanatics and fans of legendary figures – and between being the name being Kiri Kiri Basara and waking from coldsleep, he was deep into the legend category.

But he was still a minor and so was still under the guardianship of the state and still had to go to school.


	4. 4

**After Zero**  
4.

All the food tasted like ice, now. The doctors called it something, called it "pica" – pagophagia – but he was the kind of guy who took a word and ripped it to shreds and he knew that wasn't it. Pica was actually eating ice… and hair and nails and things. If he ate them, they'd probably all taste the same as well but what he was putting into his mouth was technically food – or what people in the twenty-third century.

Maybe they'd just misheard him, thought he was actually eating ice instead of complaining it all tasted like ice. And maybe his tastebuds were still frozen in time, back in that room where he'd woken up from coldsleep in something that had looked too close like a coffin for most people's comforts.

Well, he'd had the advantage of having seen it many many times from another plane, so it hadn't been that big of a deal for him. The eating though was a problem, because now that his body wasn't frozen anymore, he couldn't survive on a lack of substance. And it wasn't much fun eating things that tasted like ice all on his own.

It even made him miss Izumi sometimes, even knowing he was the reason they'd only saved nine people in the end, instead of over three hundred. Or was it two hundred? He couldn't remember anymore and most records had different numbers. Gross underestimations. Or embellishments. But Izumi's mixes were disgusting and even that would be welcome over constant ice.

Maybe he should reopen the Blue Moon café.


	5. 5

**After Zero**  
5.

Blue Moon had long faded into history. The place it should have been looked unrecognisable if not for the fact that he had witnessed the change through time.

Not for the first time, he considered how lucky he was that only his body had to adjust, and not his mind as well. They keep on talking about how he was setting the stage for the reawakening: for all those who still slumbered in coldsleep – and nobody listened when he told them his circumstances were rather different.

Pity none of Professor Hashigami's papers survived, or Sarai's annotations, or even Sumikaze's articles. Maybe he should have used Kiri Kiri Basara to preserve those as well… or maybe his own articles on the matter did have more fact than fiction but that was too long ago. He couldn't remember which was which anymore, and the rest of the world just saw entertainment value and nothing more.

Well, of the fifty or so people they'd managed to save, only about ten knew the truth. And they'd all sat together, at some point, inside this café. A café that had been struck out of history for its insignificance… even though, for him, it was a memory box he'd just come to dig out.


	6. 6

**After Zero**  
6.

He'd stopped keeping track of their families, for the most part. He did keep an eye on the Narusawa family though… through all their name changes as females married into other families and eventually emerged in the twenty-third century as Hoshimotos, amongst others. But at least the Hoshimotos were in Japan. And at least the Hoshimotos had inherited the Poya-gun so maybe they'd inherited Skysensor as well. And maybe they remembered things that were more than the legend the world had wrought for him.

But no. That was just wistful thinking and he'd known that; he'd known it all along. He'd stopped following the families of his friends for that very reason: because he'd faded into obscurity, because he was just a stranger legend to them all in the end.

He'd have to make his own life here, without Skysensor or any memento of his family or friends… and that was far more depressing than thinking he'd died all those years ago.

Well, he'd known that years before he'd woken up at least.


	7. 7

**After Zero**  
7.

The Blue Moon café opened for business at the turn of the twenty-fourth century. It was an odd sort of café, with readings from Kiri Kiri Basara: a blog infamous for the name attached to it and nothing more. But they were interesting. Sometimes, they told about times long past: things from a hundred years ago, or two hundred, or sometimes even three hundred years before. Some of it basic history with a homely feel. Some of it occult. It was a good place for modern history students to soak in the old times. It was a good place for high school occult clubs to find new mysteries to explore or hints of old.

But that was the atmosphere. The café's drinks were another story: all burning the tastebuds… but that, said the proprietor, was why they were there for. And it must have been an acquired taste because many a person had watched the proprietor himself guzzle down the same sort of drinks he made for others, so there had to be something to it.

And no-one would deny they walked out with energy buzzing through them. To which the proprietor would shrug and say 'that's the point'.

And if anyone asked the proprietor what the inspiration behind Blue Moon Café was, he'd answer: 'it's not much different to what I'd always done.' Which wasn't entirely the truth, but the rest of that answer had faded into absolute temperatures and time.


End file.
